The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts

by Thorstein Veblen

Any predisposition freely to accept and use the deliverances of sensible perception on their own recognisances simply, in the terms in which they come, and to connect them up in a system of knowledge in their own terms, without imputation of a spiritual (anthropomorphic) substratum,—for the purposes of workmanship such a predisposition should be of the first importance for effective work in the mechanic arts; and a strong instinctive bias to the contrary should be correspondingly pernicious. Any instinctive bias to colour, distort and derange the facts by imputing elements of human nature will unavoidably act to hinder and deflect the agent from an effectual pursuit of mechanical design. But the like is not true in the same degree as regards men’s dealings with animate nature. Anthropomorphic interpretation is more at home and less disserviceable here. With less serious derangement in the objective results, plants and animals may be construed to have a conscious purpose in life and to pursue their ends somewhat after the human fashion; witness the facility with which the story-tellers recount plausible episodes (feigned or real) from the life of animals and plants, and the readiness with which such tales get a hearing. Readers and hearers find no great difficulty, if any, in giving make-believe credence to the tales so long as they recount only such adventures as are physically possible to the animals of which (whom?) they are told; the hearers are always ready to go with the story-teller down this highway of make-believe into the subhuman fairy land. Mechanical phenomena, happenings in the mechanic arts, characteristics of the existence of inanimate objects and the changes which they undergo, lend themselves with much less happy effect to the anthropomorphic story-teller’s make-believe. Episodes from the feigned life-history of tools, machines and raw materials are not drawn on with anything like the same frequency, nor do the tales that recount them meet with the same untiring attention. There is always an unreality about them which even the most robust make-believe can overcome only for a short and doubtful interval. Witness the relative barrenness of primitive folk-tales on this inanimate side, as compared with the exuberance of the myths and legends that interpret the life of plants and animals; and where inanimate phenomena are drawn into the net of personation it happens almost unavoidably that a feigned person is thrown into the foreground of the tale plausibly to take the part of bearer, controller or intrigant in the episodes related.[43]

Even more to the same purpose, as showing the same insidious facility of anthropomorphic interpretation, are the bona-fide constructions of scientists and pseudo-scientists running on the imputation of purpose and deliberation to explain the behaviour of animals. Indeed, at the worst, and still in good faith, it may go so far as to impute some sort of quasi-conscious striving on the part of plants.[44] As good and temperate an instance as may be had of such anthropomorphic imputation of workmanlike gifts is afforded, for instance, by the work of Romanes on the behaviour of animals.[45] It goes to show how very plausibly some of the lower animals may be credited with these spiritual aptitudes and how far and well the imputation may be made to serve the scientist’s end. So plausible, indeed, is this anthropomorphism as to disarm even the scepticism of the trained sceptic. It will also appear in the later course of this inquiry that anthropomorphism, and especially the imputation of workmanship, has borne a much greater part in the work of the scientists than the members of that craft would like to avow; so that the scientific use of the anthropomorphic fancy is by no means a unique distinction of Romanes and the large group or school of biologists of which his work is typical; nor does the presence of this bias in their work by any means strip it of scientific value. In point of fact, it seems to touch the substance of their objective results much less seriously than might be apprehended.

The modern scientist’s watchward is scepticism and caution; and what he may be led to do concessively, in spite of himself, by too broad a consciousness of kind, the savage does joyously and with conviction. His measure of what he sees about him is himself, and his apprehension of what takes place is a comprehension of how such things would be done in the course of human conduct if they were physically possible to man. The man (more often perhaps the woman) who busies himself with the beginnings of plant and animal-breeding will sympathetically put himself in touch with their inclinations and aptitudes with a degree of intimacy and assurance never approached by the followers of Romanes. It is for him to use common sense and fall in with the drift and idiosyncracies of these others who are, mysteriously, denied the gift of speech. By the unambiguous leading of the anthropomorphic fancy he puts himself in the place of his ward, his animal or vegetable friend and cousin, and can so learn something of what is going on in the putative vegetable or animal mind, through patient observation of what comes to light in response to his attentions in the course of his joint life with them. The plant or animal manifestly does things, and the question follows, Why do these speechless others do those things which they are seen to do?—things which often do not lie within the range of things desirable to be accomplished, humanly speaking. Manifestly these non-human others seek other ends and seek them in other ways than man. Some of the objective results which it lies in their nature to accomplish in so working out their scheme of life are useful to their human cousins; and it stands to reason that when they are dealt kindly with, when man takes pains to further their ends in life, they will take thought and respond somewhat in kind. To turn the proposition about, those things which men find, by trial and error, to bring a good and kindly return from the speechless others are manifestly well received by them and must obviously be of a kind to fall in with their bent and minister to their inclinations; and prudence and fellow-feeling combine to lead men farther along the way so indicated at each move in the propitious direction.

To the unsophisticated—and even to the sophisticated sceptic—it is manifest that animate objects do things. What they aim to do, as well as the logic of their conduct in carrying out their designs, are not precisely the same as in the case of man. But by staying by and learning what they are bent on doing, and observing how they go about it, any peculiarity in the nature of their needs, spiritual and physical, and in their manner of approaching their ends, may be learned and assimilated; and their life-work can be furthered and amplified by judiciously ministering to their ascertained needs and making the way smooth for them in what they undertake, so long as their undertakings are such as man is interested in bringing to a successful issue. Of course they work toward ends that are good in their sight, though not always such as men would seek; but that is their affair and is not to be pried into beyond the bounds of a decent neighbourly interest. And they work by methods in some degree other, often wiser, than those of men, and these it is man’s place to learn if he would profit by their companionship.

Much of the scheme of life of these speechless others is a scheme of fecundity, growth and nurture, and all these matters are natural to women rather than to men; and so in the early stages of culture the consciousness of kind and congruity has made it plain to all the parties in interest that the care of crops and animals belongs in the fitness of things to women. Indeed there is such a spiritual (magical) community between women and the fecundity of animate things that any intrusion of the men in the affairs of growth and fertility may by force of contrast come to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. Since the life of plants and animals is primarily of a spiritual nature, since the initiative and trend of vegetable and animal life is of this character, it follows that some sort of propitious spiritual contact and communion should be maintained between mankind and that world of fertility and growth in which these animate things live and move. So a line of communication, of a spiritual kind, is kept open with the realm of the speechless ones by means of a sign-language systematised into ritual, and by a symbolism of amity reënforced with gifts and professions of good-will. Hence a growth of occult meanings and ceremonial procedure, to which the argument will have to return presently.[46]

By this indirect, animistic and magical, line of approach the matter-of-fact requirements of tillage and cattle-breeding can be determined and fulfilled in a very passable fashion, given only the necessary time and tranquillity. Time is by common consent allowed the stone-age culture in abundant measure; and common consent is coming, through one consideration and another, to admit that the requisite conditions of peace and quiet industry are also a characteristic feature of that early time. The fact, broad and profound, that the known crop plants and animals were for the most part domesticated in that time is perhaps in itself the most persuasive argument for the prevalence of peaceful conditions among those peoples, whoever they may have been, to whose efforts, or rather to whose routine of genial superstition, this domestication is to be credited. This domestication and use of plants and animals was of course not a mere blindfold diversion. Here as ever the instinct of workmanship was present with its prompting to make the most of what comes to hand; and the technology of husbandry, like the technology of any other industrial enterprise, has been the outcome of men’s abiding penchant for making things useful.

The peculiar advantage of tillage and cattle-breeding over the primary mechanic arts, that by which the former arts gained and kept their lead, seems to have been the simple circumstance that the propensity of workmanlike men to impute a workmanlike (teleological) nature to phenomena does not leave the resulting knowledge of these phenomena so wide of the mark in the case of animate nature as in that of brute matter. It will probably not do to say that the anthropomorphic imputation has been directly serviceable to the technological end in the case of tillage and cattle-breeding; it is rather that the disadvantage or disserviceability of such an interpretation of facts has been greater in the mechanic arts in early times. The instinct of workmanship, through the sentimental propensity to impute workmanlike qualities and conduct to external facts, has defeated itself more effectually in the mechanic arts. And as in the course of time, under favourable local conditions, the habitual imputation of teleological capacities has in some measure fallen into disuse, the mechanic arts have gained; and every such gain has in its turn, as conditions permitted, acted cumulatively toward the discredit and disuse of the teleological method of knowledge, and therefore toward an acceleration of technological gain in this field.

The inanimate factors which early man has to turn to account as a condition precedent to any appreciable advance in the industrial arts, outside of husbandry and of the use of fruits and fibres associated with it, do not lend themselves to an effectual approximation from the anthropomorphic side. Flint and similar minerals are refractory, they have no spiritual nature and no scheme or cycle of life that can be interpreted in some passable fashion as the outcome of instinctive propensities and workmanlike management. Anthropomorphic insight does not penetrate into the secret ways of brute matter, for all the reasonable concession to idiosyncracies, to recondite conceits, occult means and devious methods, with which unsophisticated man stands ready to meet them. He can see as far into a millstone as anyone along that line; but that is not far enough to be of any use, and he is debarred by his workmanlike common sense from systematically looking into the matter along any other line. It is only the blindfold, unsystematic accretions of opaque fact coming in, disjointed and unsympathetic, from the inhuman side of his technological experience that can help him out here. And experience of that kind can come upon him only inadvertently, for he has no basis on which to systematise these facts as they come, and so he has no means of intelligently seeking them. His intelligent endeavours to get at the nature of things will perforce go on the mass of knowledge which his intelligence has already comprehended, which is a knowledge of human conduct. Anthropomorphism is almost wholly obstructive in this field of brute matter, and in early times, before much in the way of accumulated matter-of-fact knowledge had forced itself upon men, the propensity to a teleological interpretation seems to have been nearly decisive against technological progress in the primary and indispensable mechanic arts. And in later phases of culture, where anthropomorphic interpretations of workmanship have been worked out into a rounded system of magic and religion, they have at times brought the technological advance to a full stop, particularly on the mechanical side, and have even led to the cancelment of gains that should have seemed secure.

It is likewise a notable fact that, as already intimated above, myth and legend have found this brute matter as refractory in their service as the instinct of workmanship has found it in the genesis of technology; and for the good reason that the same human penchant for teleological insight and elaboration has ruled in the one as in the other. Inanimate matter and the phenomena in which inanimate matter manifests its nature and force have, of course, taken a large place in folk-lore; but the folk-lore, whether myth, legend or magic, in which inanimate matter is conceived as speaking in its own right and working out its own spiritual content is relatively very scant. In magic it commonly plays a part as an instrumentality only, and indeed as an instrument which owes its magical efficacy to some efficacious circumstance external to it. It has most frequently an induced rather than intrinsic efficacy, being the vehicle whereby the worker of magic materialises and conveys his design to its execution. It is susceptible of magical use, rather than creative of magical effects.[47] No doubt this characterisation of the magical offices of inert matter applies to early and primitive times and situations rather than to the high-wrought later systems of occult science and alchemical lore that are built on some appreciable knowledge of metallurgy and chemical reactions. So likewise early myth and legend have had to take recourse to the intervention of personal, or at least animate agents, to make headway in the domain of brute matter, which figures commonly as means in the hands of manlike agents of some sort, rather than as a self-directing agent with initiative and a natural bent of its own. The phenomena of inanimate nature are likely to be thrown into the hands of such putative agents, who are then conceived to control them and turn them to account for ulterior ends not given in the native character of the inanimate objects themselves.[48] Even so exceptionally available a range of phenomena as those of fire have not escaped this inglorious eventuality. In the mythical legends of fire it will be found that the fire and all its works come into the plot of the story only as secondary elements, and the interest centres about the fortunes of some manlike agency to whose initiative and exploits all the phenomena of fire are referred as their cause or occasion.[49] The legends of fire have commonly become legends of a fire-bringer, etc.,[50] and have come to turn about the plots and counterplots of anthropomorphic beasts and divinities who are conceived to have wrestled for, with and about the use of fire.

So, on the other hand, as an illustration from the side of technology, to show how matters stood in this connection through the best days of anthropomorphism, fire had been in daily and indispensable use through an indefinite series of millennia before men, in the early modern times of Occidental civilisation, learned the use of a chimney. And all that hindered the discovery of this simple mechanical expedient seems to have been the fatal propensity of men to impute a teleological nature and workmanlike design to this phenomenon with which no truce or working arrangement can be negotiated in spiritual terms.[51]